a)Example:
the percentage of National Income (the value generated by taking raw materials
and labor worth X dollars and selling the resulting product for X+value
dollars) that goes to the salary of workers has been dropping rapidly since the
1970s. The economy is booming, but that means little to “Joe Sixpack.”

b)Example:
When we look at income by gender and ethnicity, we see great disparity: white
males make the most money, women of all ethnic groups make less, black women
make less than white women, etc.

c)Example:
“Waterworld” scenario – if we end up with massive global warming it won’t
matter what economic class or ethnicity or gender you are.

3)
Why a course on the Future of IT?

a)IT
can be critical to making changes in all 4 of these social problem areas (race,
sex, class, and environment).

b)Thinking
about the future helps us figure out what changes we need to make today – for
example, how can IT help to lower the emission of “greenhouse gasses” that lead
to global warming?

c)Our
projections of the future also tell us much about our present society

1.Classist
engineer Robert Moses constructs the bridges on Long Island such that
low-clearance bridges lead to beaches and parks, preventing poor people from
cluttering up his nice areas reserved for the rich. After Moses dies, the
bridges are still doing his dirty work – impossible to analyze under the
“technology is neutral” view. Artifacts can have politics.

2.Power
stations built in 1923 in Berlin show strong centralization, but those in
London 1923 show strong decentralization – different “cultural styles.”

3.The
first voice-recognition software worked better on men than women – not due to
an individual’s sexist agency, but do the structural sexism in the
institutions.

4.Web
search engines originally used an out-of-date thesaurus to avoid paying
copyright fees – but this means they have the linguistic politics of long-ago
(eg synomyns for “Jew” is “cheap” or “cheat”).

5)
The modern era: film “The World of Tommorrow” (a look at the 1939 World’s
Fair).

a) The modernist dream was to
eliminate the squalor of depression economics, slums etc with ORDER and
CONTROL.

b)Planned cities and the progress of science were the primary
means of achieving this shiny new future in the US (elsewhere socialism held
the same utopian promise).

c)Streamlined
designs – from toasters to trains–
symbolized the semiotics of progress, speeding toward utopia. Giant Cartesian
grids for city layouts and Euclidean shapes for buildings captured the
semiotics of planning and elimination of disorder.

d)Remember
when we laugh at ELECTROMAN etc -- how their dreams revealed the limitations of
1939 thinking – our future scenarios are similarly limited to our
era’s absurd thinking.

6)
The postmodern era: lecture on cybernetics and youth subculture.

a)1960s
mainstream cybernetics was all about modernist order and control – top-down
hierarchy, linear digital systems that imposed order from above.